Re: IMPORTANT need quick feedback on radical change

Martin Christensen <[email protected]>:

> This distinction between lists at tuples exists merely by convention,
> and even then it's not consistently used.

I think that most of the inconsistency (when it's not simply due to
ignorance) is because there are two independent reasons for wanting to
use a tuple in Python. One is because conceptually you want a
record-like rather than a collection-like structure; the other is
because you want something that's hashable for use as a dict key.
Sometimes these two requirements are in conflict with each other.

If there existed both mutable and immutable tuples, and both mutable
and immutable lists, this conflict would disappear, and I think the
use of tuples and lists could be made more consistent (given
sufficient user education).

Whether it's really worth maintaing the two types and associated
language syntax I'm not sure.

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
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